The slowest loading of the website is one of the things most website owners avoid. Not only website rankings but visitor satisfaction will also be affected. Therefore, you should always check the speed of the website by unifying and optimizing its overall performance.
How Slowness Destroys Your Website
Before we go into the how-to, let’s talk about what’s so horrible about a sluggish website. After all, what are a few extra seconds worth? Isn’t it true that people no longer have time? They don’t, as it turns out.
It raises the bounce rate
People are more likely to abandon a website that takes too long to load. According to a Google study, the slower your site is on mobile, visitors bounce more likely. As you can see, even two seconds can make a significant difference, and four seconds can double bounce rates. Finally, if you want users to stay on your site, make it as fast as possible.
Lowers Conversion Rates (Less Money)
In addition to the foregoing, increasing the speed of your website has an impact on conversions. For example, Portent discovered that reducing page loading time from two to one second can double income for e-commerce businesses.
Lowers the search engine ranking (Less Organic Traffic)
Because site speed is important to users, Google considers it when ranking websites. This has been the official policy since 2010, and it now includes mobile devices.
The latter is even more crucial now that Google has transitioned to a mobile-first index to keep up with modern web usage. That is, websites are ranked based on the performance of their mobile versions, not their desktop versions. This includes non-mobile website versions, and it’s a full 180 from the previous situation.
As a result, if your site loads slowly on mobile, it will negatively impact your overall search ranking, not just in mobile search. While Google claims that this only affects the slowest websites, site speed impacts bounce rates, time on site, and other metrics that search engines consider.
Furthermore, because crawl bots are on a budget, a slow-loading page may harm crawling. As a result, you may notice that Google indexes less of your pages.
- Detracts from the user experience
Everything above boils down to one thing: the user experience. If it’s awful, it’s bad for your site; if it’s good, it’s good for your site. Site speed can even determine whether or not a website is useable by your target audience. One of the most spectacular examples of this is from YouTube’s early days.
The time it took users in Asia, South America, Africa, and other remote locations to start watching a movie was decreased from 20 minutes to 2 minutes when the page weight was lowered from 1.2MB to 100KB. As a result, it created entirely new markets.
Although online architecture has vastly improved since then, the premise remains valid. To summarize, if you want to keep people on your site, increase conversions, rank well in search engines, and keep visitors happy, you must give an excellent speed experience at all times and on any screen size.
Step to Improve Website Speed
Perform a website performance test.
Website speed testing determines how well a website performs. Testing a website regularly can aid developers in detecting performance degradations or enhancements. A speed test should also assist developers in identifying some or all of the places that are holding down website performance, as well as where improvements may be m
There are numerous high-quality site speed tests available, many of which are free. WebPageTest.org (a Cloudflare partner) offers some free tests and thorough reports on how quickly various elements of a page load. Developers can also use WebPageTest.org to test websites on a variety of devices and network connection speeds.
Get a web hosting service that is both quick and dependable.
Good hosting is the foundation of a speedy website. No matter how hard you strive to provide the finest user experience, your website’s speed will suffer if your hosting is inadequate.
The top hosting firms handle everything, so you don’t have to know what’s going on behind closed doors. There’s a lot a hosting service can do to increase the speed of your site, from high-quality, well-maintained hardware to routinely updated software components.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
By caching content in many places around the world, CDNs help websites load faster. The cache servers of a CDN are usually closer to end-users than the host or origin server. Requests for material are sent through a CDN server rather than directly to the hosting server, which may be hundreds of miles away and connected to many autonomous networks. The use of a CDN can drastically reduce website load times.
Google also has a PageSpeed Insights tool that allows you to test your website’s speed in depth. The Network tab in Google Chrome DevTools can also assist developers in evaluating their site’s performance; it displays all HTTP requests, the size of requested assets, and the time it takes for requests to be fulfilled.
CSS and JavaScript files should be compressed
CSS and JavaScript files are commonplace on modern websites, and they work together to keep web pages looking pleasant and working in users’ favour. Line after line of code increases the size of those files unnecessarily, slowing down your site.
Web designers (the same folks who create the themes you eventually buy) want to keep their code tidy. This means that they keep the code tidy and easy to understand. White spaces, excess lines, and characters, on the other hand, add to the file’s weight, which may be readily reduced by minifying.
Clean and optimize the WordPress database
A database is required for your WordPress website to function. There is a backup of everything you do and have on the site. As you may expect, themes and plugins don’t always keep your database clean, so even if you delete a certain plugin, some data will remain in your database. The database will get congested and inefficient over time, causing the website to load slowly.
Although it is feasible to clean out the database manually, this requires knowledge of how it operates. Even if you do, there’s a good possibility you’ll make a mistake.
Fortunately, there are free WordPress plugins that can optimize and clean your database. However, before you do anything, make a comprehensive backup of your website or ensure that you have a mechanism to roll back modifications. Even though WP-Optimize is a well-known and secure plugin, directly altering a database can go wrong at times.
So, if something goes wrong, I recommend using WP Reset. This plugin will take a snapshot of your site and allow you to undo any changes you’ve made quickly. As a result, if something goes wrong, you may restore your database in a matter of minutes rather than having to restore a full backup, which can take a long time.
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